Helen Thaventhiran

Hooked is most interested in the kinds of aesthetic experience occasioned by works that ‘strike’ us forcibly. Rita Felski describes a writer being ‘hammered by’ Matisse, of Thelma and Louise striking ‘a nerve’, of Orhan Pamuk feeling his ‘body sever itself’ on reading a book’s opening page, of a filmgoer being ‘knocked backward by a sound’.

Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained a gentle level of committed awareness of words and feeling, occasionally reaching ecstatic pitch. This was the way he liked to live, and to write.

William James was acutely sensitive to both his own disabling pain and the wriggling ironies of his super-subtle family, who complicated any ideas he might profess about healthful and happy lives. In the end, it was personal experience and family that shaped James’s thought about the way health determined life’s values: he asked questions about marriage, employment, journeys to Europe, self-culture, social relations – a comparable canvas to the novels of his brother Henry.